The Kind of Face You Slash - Day 24: First the Weeping, and Then the Cold

by Richard Harland Smith

Though the same was likely not true in her lifetime, there appears to be but a single existing photograph of Dorothy Macardle half a century after her death – which is all too fitting for the author of a classic ghost story in which the portrait of a dead woman figures with fateful prominence. Macardle’s 1941 novel Uneasy Freehold, which was published in America as The Uninvited and adapted for pictures in 1944 under that name, is the tale of a brother and sister in flight from the pressures and preoccupations of a pre-World War II London who buy an old house on the Cornwall coast, only to find themselves preoccupied by the previous occupants, the non-breathing variety. By whatever name you call it, The Uninvited (the alternate title has outlived the original) is such a breezy, agile, and witty chiller that you’d be well within your rights to presume that the author was a coolly unconcerned character, a lady writer of some means who was able, at her leisure, to craft deucedly charming tales between soirees and charity auctions, as many lady writers of means did in her day. But appearances, we are told time and again, can be deceiving.

Dorothy Macardle wrote few novels, though a comprehensive accounting of all her works is problematic for several reasons (more later). She came to novel writing late in life, after work in theatre, after teaching, after taking up journalism, after having served time in prison (more about that later). She was born on February 2, 1889 in Dundalk, County Louth, Ireland; Celtic country, midway between Belfast and Dublin. If you know anything about Macardle, you will appreciate that “midway” part, as she straddled throughout her life worlds in opposition to and at odds with one another. (Amusingly, or fatefully, she was born on a Wednesday.) Her Irish father, Sir Thomas Callan Macardle, was a prominent brewer (MacArdle’s Irish Ale is still available, albeit exclusively through Guinness) and a Roman Catholic; her mother, the former Minnie Ross, was an Englishwoman who had been baptized Anglican but converted at marriage to Catholicism, the faith in which Dorothy and her brothers were catechized. Dorothy Macardle enjoyed an affluent upbringing and education at Dublin’s Alexandra College (formerly Catholic University of Ireland), seemingly none the worse for the high church/low church schism at play within her family pew.

One of Macardle’s brothers was killed in World War I in 1916, at the Battle of the Somme. Bad enough on its own terms, the Great War divided the already fractious Irish State over the question of home rule; while many Republicans refused to support the war effort (and, by extension, the queen), others signed up, dying on battlefields halfway around the world or coming home broken, haunted by their time in the trenches. Macardle had already taken up the Republican cause, joining both the Cumann na Mban (a sort of IRA sisterhood, in sympathy and collusion with the anti-British “Irish Volunteers”) and the Gaelic League, one of the few pro-Irish organizations that afforded women equal standing and status alongside men. She would spend an inordinate amount of her lifetime fighting the British for independence and her own people to promote sexual equality. If you accept the long view of her life, she took a three-pronged approach to changing popular opinion: as an historian, she chronicled what had gone on, the history of the Civil War; as a journalist, she chronicled what was going on, the news of the day; and as a playwright/ novelist, she spun allegories by which she hoped to impart emotional truths that people were not predisposed to want to hear.

Around the time that her father received knighthood, Macardle was imprisoned for opposing a British-Irish treaty – one has to wonder about the tone of family conversation around the tea tray at that time, though visits home were likely at a premium. (Rumor has it that Dorothy Macardle did not get on with her mother – again, fascinating if you know her history or have read The Uninvited). The Black and Tans (British soldiers in the Royal Irish Constabulary) raided her flat in 1922 and carted her off to jail. She would serve time in both Mountjoy Prison and Kilmainham Gaol, where she began collecting the stories that would comprise Earth-Bound: Nine Stories of Ireland (published in 1924). All but one of these was touched with the supernatural, sloughing off the realism she had afforded her stage plays, to embrace the persuasive mechanics of parable. Macardle learned a lot from her fellow inmates (she dedicated each of the stories in the anthology to a specific friend) but understood the truths she learned behind bars needed to be smuggled out in another form. And what better camouflage to mule the truth of female subjugation to Ireland than Gothic fiction?

In The Uninvited, a brother and sister of Irish descent, Rod and Pamela Fitzgerald, quit London for a grand but gloomy manor set on a Cornish cliffside. They are able to buy the place for a song from a retired military man, whose daughter died there many years earlier, and who raises his orphaned granddaughter in the village. The Fitzgeralds take a liking to the granddaughter, Stella, and invite her to visit them. Sensitive by nature, the girl perceives a presence in the house, an entity that is by turns nurturing and malicious, one that she comes to believe is, in its maddening inconsistencies, the spirit of her late mother. I won’t spoil the reveal of the book or its excellent Hollywood adaptation because I want to address something that fell between the cracks of adaptation – namely the novel’s treatment of the Irish by the British and the ways in which the author tacitly criticized her own countrymen, specifically those who did not keep faith in upholding the rights of women alongside those of men. Though Macardle had by this point written her magnum opus, The Irish Republic: A Documented Chronicle of the Anglo-Irish Conflict and the Partitioning of Ireland, with a Detailed Account of the Period 1916-1923, and characterized herself as “a propagandist, unrepentant and unashamed,” she held lingering doubts about the New Ireland and its relegation of women to the role of mother, best fit for nurturing the next generation of Irish nationalists.

The ghostly business notwithstanding, some of the best bits in The Uninvited hang on the Commander (as Stella’s grandfather is called) and his discomfiture at discussion of anything Irish. When Pamela inquires “Is there a Celtic strain in North Devon?” the Commander snaps “None! … The Welsh are an entirely different race.” When Pamela broaches the subject of the Fitzgerald family ancestress, wife of a celebrated Irish patriot, the Commander brushes her off by claiming “I am afraid that I am not well acquainted with Irish rebel history,” evincing a distaste for the subject that he might otherwise reserve for spanking literature or Negroana. The delineation of character by nationality is thus established. The Irish Fitzgeralds are etched as passionate, caring, artistic, and progressive while the English Commander is branded fearful, chauvinistic, inflexible, and intractable. Caught in the middle is Stella who, we find out, is of mixed heritage and is as such perfectly poised to straddle these seemingly incompatible worlds and the gulf between the living and the dead.

By its conclusion (a literal cliffhanger), The Uninvited asserts itself as a reckoning, an establishment of truth over myth (Macardle’s former allies were reportedly uncomfortable with the final revelation and its reflection on Mother Ireland), while also using the model of a woman and the mother lost to her as a metaphor for an essential mourning that Macardle (who opined the encroaching conservatism of her own country) felt all too keenly. (One biographer described the author’s relationship to her own mother as “unharmonious,” a word that evokes the spiritualist movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries – a vogue that accelerated apace, at least for a while, with the women’s rights movement.) All this is missing from Lewis Allen’s otherwise very fine film adaptation, released by Paramount Pictures in February 1944 with Ray Milland and Ruth Hussey playing the Fitzgeralds (Rod having been rechristened Rick), Donald Crisp as the fussy Commander Beech (Brooke in the novel), and Gail Russell as Stella. I don’t blame Lewis, or his screenwriters Frank Partos and Dodie Smith, for leaving out the racial subtext, which would have limited the film’s appeal. As it stands, the film is a delightful (and not infrequently creepy) confection that supports the novel’s main arguments in a basic way while also inviting the curious to check out its source – and well they should.

Dorothy Macardle died of cancer in Drogheda in 1958. At the time of her passing, she had completed two more novels, The Unforeseen (published in 1946) and Dark Enchantment (1953), both of which centered on sensitive, inquiring females in strange and fearful situations. A theatre fire in 1951 had destroyed some of her dramatic works (the Black and Tans had done as much for a considerable portion of her political writing at the time of her 1922 arrest) and after her death Macardle’s surviving brother, his reasoning apparently lost to time, burned her papers. Only a portion of what she accomplished in her three-score and nine years survives – her published works, her history of the Irish Civil War, some plays, three novels… and a single picture. This photograph depicts a dark-haired, serious young woman, her lips pressed tight with steely resolve, her eyes set on an uncertain but unavoidable future, unblinking, unwavering, and unafraid.
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Richard Harland Smith has been a book and film critic for Video Watchdog magazine since 1999 and a contributing writer for Turner Classic Movies since 2006. A longtime writer of supplemental material for such DVD companies as Anchor Bay Entertainment, No Shame Films, Severin Films, Dark Sky Films, and Synapse Films, he has also contributed to the books Contemporary North American Film Directors: A Wallflower Critical Guide, Contemporary British and Irish Film Directors: A Wallflower Critical Guide, The Book of Lists: Horror, "Hey Kids, Comics!" True Life Tales from the Spinner-Rack, and Vampiros and Monstruos: The Mexican Horror Film of the 20th Century. He blogs weekly at The Movie Morlocks, the official film blog of Turner Classic Movies, and lives in Los Angeles, California, with his wife and children.

Bombastic Ignoramous

"I'm less interested in pointing out ostensible flaws than I am in going where the movie takes me." - Richard Harland Smith

Well excuse me, Richard Harland Smith!

Oh, hello. As you may already be aware, today sees the release on Blu-ray of director Jean Yarbrough’s 1940 Bela Lugosi vehicle The Devil Bat, courtesy of the good people at Kino, and I’ve recently had the opportunity to give it a look. For the second time in my life, as I quickly realized -- I think it hit me that the film wasn’t new to me when Lugosi’s Dr. Paul Carruthers is on the phone, warmly speculating that the family party he’s been invited to might include among its celebrations the engagement of Mary Heath (Suzanne Kaaren) to "that rascal" Don Morton (Gene O'Donnell). This is very early in the film, before, though not long before, we discover that Carruthers plans on slaughtering the apparently nice Heath and Morton families (for whom he has worked, developing new and powerful shaving lotions, and who Carruthers believes screwed him out of a fortune) with his giant mutant bats (okay, we know the bats exist), but even so that kind of sentiment coming out of the mouth of a character played by Bela Lugosi seems alien. I’m sure there are exceptions – I mean, hell, Lugosi even played a good guy now and then – but Lugosi very often played villains who, if they didn’t come by their evil naturally, had nevertheless been driven ‘round the bend long before we meet him. Contrast this with Boris Karloff, who frequently played villains whose descent we get to witness. Anyway, over the years I’ve learned not to trust Lugosi’s smiling face.

Which brings me to a few things, the first of which is sort of the key to where I want to go with this whole post. That is, the way Lugosi delivers the line about the engagement struck me, both times I’ve seen the film, as ridiculous. By which I mean, I laughed at it. Not, I don’t think, with derision, but more with a “Oh, Lugosi sure wasn’t suited for that kind of thing!” attitude. To what kind of thing? you may well ask. Happiness? An emotion we soon learn is a put on anyway. Well, get off my ass, it sounds funny the way he says it. Still, this kind of thing can infect a person, and taint how they engage with a movie, any movie, really, though I submit that horror and science fiction films of a certain vintage, and usually made for a certain budget, are the most likely to suffer at the hands of the infected. The process of watching such movies, and the early days of the revival of Ed Wood probably began the popularization of this, often seems to be one of presumption followed by a need for quick and relentless confirmation. If The Giant Claw is not bad enough, then your seventy-five minutes has just been wasted. And it naturally follows that whatever might actually be good or interesting about The Giant Claw might easily be missed because it is not why we're watching the film.

And this seems like a good time to refer back to the quote that opened this post. I know Richard, and I think of him as a friend -- how I think of him is immaterial -- and this quote, which comes from his excellent commentary track included on the Kino's The Devil Bat disc, is a more baldly-stated version of a philosophy that has been clear in his writings for Movie Morlocks and his superb yet now sadly mostly inactive blog Arbogast on Film. The philosophy, as best I can express it, is "Don't start a movie with your fists up." Or with a smirk on your face, is maybe better. This way of watching a film is not something I'm immune to. I mentioned The Giant Claw before, and I don't honestly know if there is anything good or interesting about it, because when I saw it I wasn't looking (that bird is something else, though). I mean, it can be a great deal of fun, and movies can also be a great deal of fun for all the wrong reasons. Many who lean towards the Smith/Arbogastian side of things can get so wound up about it that they're unable to enjoy Mystery Science Theater 3000, and that's not the kind of life I want for myself. But some years ago, at his blog Cinema Styles, Greg Ferrara, another friend of mine and of Richard's, hosted a blogathon, back when people did that sort of thing, called The Spirit of Ed Wood Blogathon. The idea there was not to have any illusions about Wood's talent, or to burn your leg with a hot needle any time you thought of laughing at something ridiculous in Bride of the Monster, but rather to celebrate the intent and the passion, and even the clumsiness. The Doing Of It, whatever it might finally look like. Otherwise you can find yourself not being amused by the content of an ineptly made film, but by its very existence.

And maybe it's not actually as inept as the hype, or "hype," has led you to believe. The Devil Bat, Richard strongly argues, is not inept. This being a Poverty Row production, it is cheaply made, but that's not the same thing. It was made by a crew of professionals (and by the way, a not entirely brief digression: Richard's commentary is of the "film historian" stripe also favored by your Eddie Mullers, your Tom Weavers, your Steve Habermans, and so forth, by far my favorite type, and as such is something of a juggling act between cast and crew biographies, necrologies, film analysis, and sidenotes. The connections, in a six-degrees kind of way, that Richard unearths between The Devil Bat and The Three Stooges, The Red Skelton Show, Notorious and lots of other stuff proves, if any more proof was needed, that the early days of the studio system in Hollywood was a crazy goddamn time. Richard also makes a point that might make "What was the first slasher film?" types throw up their hands in despair) who weren't delusional about what their job was in this particular instance, but tried to use their experience and imagination to make the best out of their limited budget, an admirable way of going about things that can lead to Cat People or it can lead to, well, The Devil Bat, which I do not, as it happens, like as much, or rather sincerely like as much, as Richard does. The film is structured around the deaths of the Heaths and the Mortons, so that outside of Lugosi and the the wise-cracking journalist pair (Dave O'Brien and Donald Kerr) who come in to investigate, all the characters are related, or betrothed, and yet the deaths register as nothing much at all. This heedless, ever-forward kind of filmmaking can be thrilling, but in a story like this kind of begs the audience to scoff -- it matters to no one onscreen, so why should it matter to me?

Though why is that kind of narrative base-touching all that matters? Richard, who doesn't entirely agree with me about this emotional, or emotionless, depending who you ask, facet of The Devil Bat, would argue that the baby should not be thrown out with the bathwater. And he's right. Nowadays, audiences, particularly the vocal online sort, will throw out that baby and then piss all over it for far less. Prometheus leaps to mind unbidden, and the cries of "But a guy who was a space zoologist..." and "If I was a space robot I would never..." that swarmed, smothered, and torched that film's chances to be seriously engaged with by anyone other than loony-bird "apologists" such as, well, myself. Hitchcock, were he still alive and making movies, would, in the face of the Plot Hole Condemnation Affiliate and the Two-Dimensional Character Persecution Affinity, say something like "Fuck this shit." You get the idea, I think, but my point is the kind of dismissal that Richard argues against is spreading and taking new forms, hiding as sophistication within the bodies of Glenn Kenny's "know-somethingish" types, who, quite frankly, plague us, and whose most distinguishing characteristic is that they walk into a film believing that they know better than the film itself what the film is, and what it's goals are. Or they bring with them a mental checklist of what a film is supposed to be, and if all those boxes aren't ticked, brother, you better watch out (Coppola's Twixt is a recent victim of this, but more on that, and this is a promise I can actually keep, later). This even applies to Ed Wood, which was the idea behind Greg's blogathon. I'm a bit dubious about the levels to which some people have taken their appreciation of Wood -- if he was something other than incompetent, I've yet to notice it -- but if Glen or Glenda? is only hilarious to you, then you didn't sit down with the goal of actually watching a movie. This does not mean that Glen or Glenda? isn't hilarious. It also doesn't mean that the "you" in my previous sentence has never applied to me. It has, and often. But boy is that experience becoming emptier and emptier.

So anyhow, that's the pile we're buried in, and it's left to The Devil Bat to fight its way out. Not liking the film as much as Richard doesn't mean I don't take his point, both in general and as it pertains specifically to The Devil Bat. Lugosi, Richard says in his commentary, is on point throughout. That's true. It's up to the viewer to understand where that point is located.